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Player-manager


A player-coach (also playing coach, captain-coach, or player-manager) is a member of a sports team who simultaneously holds both playing and coaching duties. A player-coach may be a head coach or an assistant coach. They may make changes to the squad and also play on the team.

Very few current major professional sports teams have head coaches who are also players, though it is extremely common for senior players to take a role in managing more junior athletes. Historically, when professional sports had much less money to pay players and coaches or managers, it was much more common to find them. Likewise, where player-coaches exist today, they are more common at the lower levels where money is less available, but not exclusively.

The player-coach was, for many decades, a long-time fixture in professional basketball. Many notable coaches in the NBA served as player-coaches, including Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkens. This was especially true up through the 1970s, when the league was not as financially successful as it is today, and player-coaches were often used to save money. The practice fell out of favor in the 1980s (though Mike Dunleavy Sr., while an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks, once came out of retirement and played several games when a rash of injuries decimated the team). Today, the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the players' union prohibits the use of player-coaches, in order to avoid circumventing the league's salary cap, as coaches' salaries are not counted under the cap. Therefore, if a player is to serve as a coach, he would have to receive commission from his contract as a player. The player, then, is not technically an official coach of his team but instead simply a coach in name. One example of a player in recent years who was groomed for eventual official coaching duties using this practice was Avery Johnson.

In the early days of professional American football, player-coaches were common. During the 1920s, legendary player-coaches in the NFL include Curly Lambeau (who played for the Green Bay Packers from 1919–1929, and served as their head coach from 1919–1949) and George Halas who held similar roles for the Chicago Bears, a team for which he was also part-owner and business manager. Jimmy Conzelman was player-coach for four different teams during the 1920s. As professional football became more respectable, and began to make more money, player-coaches (especially head coaches) became rare. In the mid-1950s Tom Landry played defensive back while serving as defensive coordinator for the New York Giants. In the early 1970s, when Landry was coach of the Dallas Cowboys, he made running back Dan Reeves a player-coach. More modern players have acted as player-coaches in an unofficial capacity, such as journeyman quarterback Steve DeBerg, who served as an unofficial mentor for younger, more skilled arms while also serving as their backup.


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